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Did Unilateral Divorce Raise Divorce Rates?: Evidence from Panel Data

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Leora Friedberg
Abstract

This paper revisits the evidence on the impact of no-fault divorce laws on divorce rates in the United States. Most states switched from requiring mutual consent to allowing unilateral or no-fault divorce between 1970 and 1985, while the national divorce rate more than doubled after 1965. It has been shown, however, that, as an application of the Coase theorem, the legal shift should have had no effect on divorce rates. Recent papers using cross-sectional micro data have disputed the empirical importance of unilateral divorce, disagreeing in paricular about controls for state-level heterogeneity in divorce propensities. This paper uses a panel of state-level divorce rates which includes virtually every divorce in the U.S. over the entire period of the law changes. Adding comprehensive controls -- year and state fixed effects and state fixed trends -- for changing unobserveable divorce propensities reveals that unilateral divorce raised the national divorce rate by 7% of the national average of 5.0 during the period, contributing 16% of the increase in the divorce rate.

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Paper provided by Department of Economics, UC San Diego in its series University of California at San Diego, Economics Working Paper Series with number 97-02.

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Date of creation: Jan 1997
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Handle: RePEc:cdl:ucsdec:97-02

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  1. Jacobson, Louis S & LaLonde, Robert J & Sullivan, Daniel G, 1993. "Earnings Losses of Displaced Workers," American Economic Review, American Economic Association, vol. 83(4), pages 685-709, September. [Downloadable!] (restricted)
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  2. Peters, H Elizabeth, 1986. "Marriage and Divorce: Informational Constraints and Private Contracting," American Economic Review, American Economic Association, vol. 76(3), pages 437-54, June.
  3. Gruber, Jonathan & Hanratty, Maria, 1995. "The Labor-Market Effects of Introducing National Health Insurance: Evidence from Canada," Journal of Business & Economic Statistics, American Statistical Association, vol. 13(2), pages 163-73, April.
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  4. Peters, H Elizabeth, 1992. "Marriage and Divorce: Reply," American Economic Review, American Economic Association, vol. 82(3), pages 687-93, June.
  5. Allen, Douglas W, 1992. "Marriage and Divorce: Comment," American Economic Review, American Economic Association, vol. 82(3), pages 679-85, June. [Downloadable!] (restricted)
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